Cause to Fear

by Pierce, Blake

  She was shut inside the freezer—this makeshift cryospa. Only Erin had no intention of making her look better or help get rid of signs of aging. She was going to freeze her to death. It was already cold inside, probably because it had been running only moments ago. That thought then led to another: she had been stripped of her clothes. She was stripped down to just her bra and panties. However, she was weirdly relieved to find that she had not been cleaned and shaved like the others.

  That raised several questions, all of which paraded through her head in a panicked jumble.

  That woman Erin was dragging across the floor was in here. Had she already been cleaned and shaved? Is she dead? Can she be saved?

  What’s about to happen to me? Can I get out?

  Avery brought her legs up, hoping to get to her knees and push against the top of the freezer. She knew the lock would be holding the lid in place but she had to at least try.

  At the same moment she realized that she was not going to be able to shift herself into the position to do this, she heard the sound of a small motor or engine kick on from somewhere very close by. A split second later, there was a hissing noise and the inside of the freezer grew immediately colder. It was pitch black, so she could see nothing—but she knew what it was. Whatever was in that tank was being pumped into the freezer.

  Liquid nitrogen, she thought.

  She took a series of deep breaths and tried clearing her head, trying to push away the effects of the chemicals she had breathed in. It had apparently been a small dose, maybe some that had been left over from the other woman and used in haste.

  She thought of Ramirez, stuck in that hospital bed.

  That can’t be the last time I ever see him…

  She bit back a cry of utter surprise and shock when she felt the freezer get unbearably cold. Her body started to shudder. She balled her hands into fists, trying to center herself, trying to keep her thoughts in order. There had to be some way out of this. But how…?

  The freezer, she thought. She made this herself. The tank and the piping I saw was not professional grade, and neither is the freezer itself. If I can inflict some damage on this thing…

  It was a long shot, but it was the only shot she had.

  She drew her legs back again, drawing her knees up. She lashed out with a horizontal kick with as much power as she could muster. Her feet slammed into the back end of the freezer, the end where she had seen the tank hooked up. It stung her feet and every movement she made seemed to be hindered by an impossible cold—a cold she had never even dreamed existed.

  Her teeth were chattering. She felt the coldness everywhere, so prevalent that it felt like it was literally seeping into her skin and filling every joint and muscle of her body. Still, she summoned up determination from the very pit of her heart and delivered another kick with both feet. And then another and another, seeing Ramirez in the hospital bed with each jolt.

  The freezer trembled with each report. From outside of the freezer walls, she could barely hear Erin DeVoss’s voice. She was yelling for Avery to stop it, to stop kicking at the inside of the freezer. Avery could hear it clearly now, the haze of the chemicals settling down to nearly nothing.

  “Stop it right fucking NOW!” Erin was screaming.

  Fat chance, Avery thought.

  She drew back and kicked again, putting everything she had into it because she sensed her body may not be able to continue working in such a way as the liquid nitrogen continued to come pouring it.

  With this last kick, the hissing noise stopped. There was a brief clattering noise and then silence. After a few seconds, she could hear Erin’s voice again. She sounded very upset; fuming, in fact. There was a loud banging noise as she slapped at the top of the freezer.

  Then Avery heard something that sent her heart soaring—a noise she had not expected to hear: the jingling of keys. She heard a commotion against the front side of the freezer. She could picture Erin slipping the key into the lock but could not imagine why.

  While all of this happened, she could also hear Erin chanting something over and over, almost like a mantra. “Oh you bitch, oh you bitch!”

  She stripped me to my underwear, Avery thought. She has my gun. I broke her little human freezer. Maybe she’s going to punish me. Maybe—

  There was a click as the lock was disengaged.

  Willing herself to move despite the paralyzing cold, Avery drew her knees up one last time. Although she knew she didn’t have enough room to get into a crouching position, she was pretty sure all she’d need was enough pressure on her feet to provide a nice push.

  That and perfect timing.

  Still shuddering and barely able to even feel her feet, much less use them, Avery pushed them down onto the floor of the freezer as well as she could. She brought her back up, pushing herself by the arms from the floor. She had to time it right or she was going to die. This thought went through her head like a bullet even as Erin opened the top of the freezer.

  The moment Avery saw the light from that downstairs room where the lid had previously been, she sprang up as well as she could. Erin, clearly not expecting such a feat, didn’t have time to move. Avery’s blow was off but she still made an impact. Rather than delivering a hard uppercut directly under the chin, the punch went wide right. It clipped Erin’s nose in a clumsy fashion, yet the effect was immediate.

  Her hands went to her nose as blood flowed right away. She took a step backward in shock, allowing Avery to try climbing over the side of the freezer. Her limbs were still shocked by the cold, though; rather than land gracefully on the floor, she landed in a heap of arms and legs and hair.

  The cold had apparently stemmed the flow of blood from her head and without blood in her eyes, she could clearly see Erin come running at her. Avery noticed that she did not have the gun, which was likely her only saving grace. Erin lifted her leg and attempted to stomp down on Avery’s back. She was able to roll out of the way, though, causing Erin to miss by about a foot.

  With each motion outside of the freezer, Avery’s body seemed to remember what it was for. As she got to her feet, she saw that one of the earlier shots she had gotten off had apparently struck Erin high in the right shoulder.

  I’ve got to exploit that, Avery thought as Erin came rushing at her again.

  Avery lashed out with her right hand, striking Erin directly in the gunshot wound in her shoulder.

  Erin screamed and went to a knee in pain. And that was all the opportunity Avery needed.

  She threw a knee up, striking Erin in the chin. Before she could rock backward to the floor, Avery wrapped an arm around her neck and tackled her to the floor. There, she applied a rear-naked choke, a move that proved easier to apply than she’d thought without clothes on.

  Erin tried fighting out of it but each urgent movement in an attempt to get out of it only made her situation worse. The one time she did nearly get out of it, Avery moved her elbow down just enough to grate against the wound in her shoulder.

  It took less than a minute before her struggles subsided and just another ten seconds or so before she was unconscious. Avery held on for another couple of seconds just to be safe. With a gasp of breath and shudders still passing through her, she let go. She rolled away and slowly got to her feet, bracing herself against the freezer.

  With no idea of how long Erin DeVoss would be out, Avery stretched out her muscles, making sure they were in working order from the cold. When she felt confident, she looked around for her clothes.

  She found them in the bathroom, alongside another pile of clothes. These were a woman’s gym clothes—apparently belonging to the woman in the bathtub. When Avery checked her vitals, she discovered that the woman was ice cold. Avery detected a very weak pulse and wondered just how long this poor woman had been in the freezer.

  She was in the freezer when Erin and I came down the stairs, she thought as she slipped into her pants. Feeling at least somewhat back to normal in regards to temperature, she grabbed her phone fro
m her jacket and dialed up O’Malley.

  “Yeah?” he said. “Any luck?”

  Avery slipped her shirt over her head. She found her gun beneath the other woman’s clothes and looked at it oddly, wondering why Erin had not simply killed her. Had she, Avery, also been meant to be a piece of Erin’s art?

  “Avery?” O’Malley said from the other end.

  “Sorry,” she said, snapping around and doing her very best not to dissolve into a mess of tears. “I’m here,” she finally said. “I’ve got her.”

  “Got who!?” he asked.

  She caught her breath.

  “The killer.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Avery found herself back in the hospital that afternoon, ironically, a floor beneath Ramirez. A nurse was putting six stitches in her forehead where Erin had assaulted her with the key. She’d been looked over for other injuries but had come out clean.

  Finley was there with her, sitting in a chair against the wall and looking at pictures of items that had been taken out of Erin’s trash can. “Hot off the presses,” he said, showing her one of the pages.

  “What is it?” Avery asked, wincing a bit as the nurse put in the final stitch.

  “O’Malley and some of the other guys found rough drafts of each note Erin DeVoss sent out. They were crumpled up in the trash. One of them seems to have been written after Patty Dearborne was killed. In this rough draft, she actually even tells us her plans. Check this out: How to capture beauty? How to repossess it…to take it from less worthy, those without scars, those that know no pain. And if I can’t capture their beauty, I will dispose of them until it works. I will tame beauty and have death on its knees.”

  “Have they gotten anything out of her?” Avery asked.

  “Nothing…just a bunch if crazy gibberish like this letter. She said she never meant to kill anyone…that the women we found in the ice were failed attempts at her work. She claims she sent the letters to us to get media attention. She thought her work would be misunderstood but appreciated one day. She wanted all eyes on it.”

  The nurse gave a little shudder as she finished up her work. “We’re good here,” she said. “Another doctor will come in soon to let you go.”

  Avery only nodded. She looked at Finley and asked: “How’s the girl from Erin’s house?”

  “Not good. Her name is Melissa Carter and she was touch-and-go for the first hour after the paramedics had arrived. The doctors are fairly certain she’ll make it but they are concerned about brain damage—but only time will tell.”

  “Thanks, Finley.”

  “Sure. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to call Connelly and fill him in. You need anything?”

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  Finley left her alone and Avery found that she was literally jumping out of her skin to make it up to see Ramirez. She was fortunate that within five minutes a doctor came in, looked her over, and cleared her to leave.

  Avery walked down the hall toward the elevator and saw Finley walking back toward her room.

  “They letting you go?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’m heading up to see Ramirez. I’ll catch up with you at work tomorrow.”

  “I’ll pass it on,” Finley said. “You know…with what you went through, you should maybe go see Sloane.”

  She knew he was just being kind and sweet in that clueless way he usually was, but something about the comment stung. He was probably right but with everything that was going on—with Ramirez and the sergeant position and patching things up with Rose—visiting a shrink on a regular basis was the last thing she needed.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “And would you please keep me posted on the DeVoss case until I come in tomorrow?”

  “Sure thing. Take care, Avery.”

  He gave her a brief and awkward hug before turning to leave. She appreciated it. He could have gotten on the elevator with her, waiting his turn to go down after she went up to see Ramirez. But he was giving her some space and she appreciated it.

  Upstairs, she found Ramirez in the same condition she had left him in. She walked into the room slowly and walked toward his unresponsive body. She took his hand in hers and kissed it.

  “So I got the killer,” she said. “It was a woman. I’m sure you would have gotten some sort of morbid kick out of that.”

  She reached into her pocket and took out the ring box. The thought that it had been discarded with her clothes on the bathroom floor of Erin DeVoss’s house sent a creeping chill through her.

  “I won’t lie,” she said, tumbling it around with her fingers. “I don’t know what I would say. But if you hurry the hell up and come back to me, we can talk about it. Sound good?”

  She placed his hand back on the bed and took the same seat she had crashed in the previous night. While she still had a few hours before nightfall, she had no place else to go. She sat in the chair by Ramirez’s bed and thought of becoming sergeant and, beyond that, what it might feel like to take a new position at work with an engagement ring on her hand.

  A thin smile came to her face when she realized that one of those achievements was suddenly much more appealing than the other.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  Avery was spoiling herself with a chai latte at Starbucks when she received the first of three terrible phone calls at 7:55 in the morning.

  Her mind was elsewhere when the call came. She was thinking about how things had panned out with Erin DeVoss. A psychological evaluation had uncovered a number of issues, one of which could likely be used in court to get her off on an insanity charge. From what Avery knew, though, she’d still be confined to a psych ward and as far as Avery was concerned, that was a win.

  In her interrogations, DeVoss had told about a traumatic childhood where her mother, starved for a son to spoil after her father had left, began to groom Erin as a boy, going so far as to change the spelling of her name to Aaron—more appropriate for a boy. The scarring on her face had come from a punishment for doing girl-oriented things; her mother had placed her face on a live stove burner. It was a tragic story, sure…but lots of killers had sad stories and as far as Avery was concerned, it was not her job to feel sympathy. It was her job to catch them to keep them from causing more harm.

  And in that respect, Avery felt she had succeeded in the case of Erin DeVoss.

  When her phone rang as she was collecting her coffee from the barista, Avery hoped it would be Dr. Chambers, letting her know that Ramirez had come around and was asking for her. When she saw it was Rose and then saw the early time, she started to worry right away.

  “Rose?” she said, heading back out to her car with her latte in one hand and the phone in the other. “It’s early. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry to call you. It’s so stupid.”

  “What is it, Rose?”

  “It’s Marcus. He…I don’t think he meant to…but he hit me.”

  Fury flashed through Avery like a wind as she got behind the steering wheel of her car. “Is he still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rose started to protest but Avery killed the call right away. She hit the road like a woman possessed. The stitches on her head were starting to itch and she knew this meant they were healing. They seemed to pulse slightly as she drove forward, reminding her that she was not invincible and that two days ago, she had been in a very precarious situation. Maybe she should slow down.

  I’ll slow down when I take that sergeant job, she thought, already resenting it. Besides, personal life and work life are two different things.

  She blazed to Rose’s apartment with no regard for the speed limit and came to a screeching halt on the other side of the apartment building. She wasted no time with the elevator when she reached the lobby. She went straight for the stairs. When her phone rang again she checked it just to see if it was Dr. Chambers. When she saw that it was Rose again, she ignored it and took the three flights of stairs up to Rose’s apartment.

  She k
nocked on the door and it was answered right away. Rose looked flustered and afraid. But there was also a red whelp on the side of her face.

  Avery sneered and asked, “Is he still here?”

  “Yes. I didn’t tell him you were coming because I hoped you’d rethink things and—”

  Avery walked into the little foyer and into the living room where she saw Marcus sitting on the couch. He had a laptop on his legs, watching a YouTube video.

  He glanced up and apparently saw the look on Avery’s face. He set the laptop aside and got to his feet.

  “Mrs. Black, I didn’t mean to. It was just an—”

  Rather than punch him and cause some very serious damage, she gave him a hard open-handed slap across the face. He looked at her with shocked anger for a split second but it quickly dissolved into embarrassment and fear. She took a little too much pride in the fact that his bottom lip started to tremble.

  “I dare you to try to tell me it was an accident,” Avery said.

  “Mom,” Rose said, running into the room. But that was all she had to say when she saw the look of determination on her mother’s face.

  “Well, it wasn’t on purpose,” Marcus said, his lip still trembling. “I love Rose and would never hurt her. I don’t…I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  She punched him then and it felt far too good. The blow landed squarely on his nose and she heard it break. He roared in pain and stumbled backward. Before he could get too far away, she reached out and grabbed him by the back of the neck. She squeezed hard, pinching a nerve and driving him to his knees. He cried out in pain again but this one was muffled, as his hand was at his nose, catching the falling blood.

  “What the hell?” he whined.

  “Get out, Marcus,” Avery said. “And if you think about reporting me for beating you up, just know that I have friends everywhere. Friends that you don’t want on your bad side. Now…apologize to my daughter.”

  “I already did! I told her I was—”